I'm a writer and humorist living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my novel LOSING CLEMENTINE out March 6 from William Morrow. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.

Favorite Quotes:"Taint what a horse looks like, itís what a horse be." - A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett

"Trying to take it easy after you've finished a manuscript is like trying to take it easy when you have a grease fire on a kitchen stove." - Jan Burke

"Put on your big girl panties, and deal with it." - Mom

"How you do anything is how you do everything."

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2006-07-19 1:47 PME-mail poetry bandit

Okay, all the offers to enlarge my penis I could handle, but this crap is just weird.

I'm now getting haiku spam.

Really. Seriously. I swear. It's not even, as far as I can tell, cleverly disguising something else to get through my e-mail filter. It's not an ad for Viagra or barely legal porn. It's just, well, art. But it's unbidden art. Kamikaze art. Like driving down the freeway to the doctor's office to have your infected toe corns removed and WHAM! someone throws a painting at your windshield.

Perhaps not quite so alarming but close.

They're arriving regularly at what seem to be faster intervals. It's escalating. I have a serial poet on my hands ready to snap. So far the subjects are innocuous, but we're just one good stanza away from, "If I can't have you, no one can!" I can feel it.

Frankly, I suspect a disturbed art school student. I am an expert on disturbed art school students, and I feel qualified to recognize their patterns. My husband got his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, which - let's face it - could've been renamed the Kansas City Outpatient Facility.

Okay, this next paragraph was supposed to be filled with examples of crazy stuff his fellow students did for projects. So I sent him an instant message asking for a quick review. And now I can't print them. None of them. Nope. Not gonna do it. I love my readers too much, and, frankly, my mother shows these essays to my grandparents. Suffices to say, they are all pornographic. Pornographic and disturbing, and I must now go wash myself.

Husband: (describes one woman's project in unprintable detail)

Me: (mouth hanging open in horrified disgust) "Jesus. Are you serious?"

Husband: "Yep. Will that work?"

Me: "No. Don't you have some non-porn examples?"

Husband: (thinks for a really long time) "Not really."

Me: "None?!?"

Husband: (thinks some more) "I heard a rumor that a sculpture student attached all her belongings to her apartment ceiling once."

...I should add that for this stellar education we are still paying off student loans...

We can only hope the poetry bandit stays on his medication and out of the black curtained area of the video store for everyone's sake.